|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
Fieldiana Anthropology: A Continuation Of The Anthropological
Series Of Field Museum Of Natural History, V41.
Fieldiana Anthropology: A Continuation Of The Anthropological
Series Of Field Museum Of Natural History, V41.
Hidden high in the Sierra de Guatemala mountain range of
northeastern Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas is the northernmost
tropical cloud forest of the Western Hemisphere. Within its humid
oak-sweetgum woodlands, tropical and temperate species of plants
and animals mingle in rare diversity, creating a mecca for birders
and other naturalists.
Fred and Marie Webster first visited Rancho del Cielo, cloud
forest home of Canadian immigrant Frank Harrison, in 1964, drawn by
the opportunity to see such exotic birds as tinamous, trogons,
motmots, and woodcreepers only 500 miles from their Austin, Texas,
home. In this book, they recount their many adventures as
researchers and tour leaders from their base at Rancho del Cielo,
interweaving their reminiscences with a history of the region and
of the struggle by friends from both sides of the border to have
some 360,000 acres of the mountain declared an area protected from
exploitation--El Cielo Biosphere Reserve. Their firsthand
reporting, enlivened with vivid tales of the people, land, and
birds of El Cielo, adds an engagingly personal chapter to the story
of conservation in Mexico.
As recently as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to
geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant
armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other
large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of
science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North
and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the
last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir,
"Twilight of the Mammoths "presents in detail internationally
renowned paleoecologist Paul Martin's widely discussed and debated
"overkill" hypothesis to explain these mysterious megafauna
extinctions. Taking us from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon, where
he finds himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to other important
fossil sites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's engaging book, written
for a wide audience, uncovers our rich evolutionary legacy and
shows why he has come to believe that the earliest Americans
literally hunted these animals to death.
As he discusses the discoveries that brought him to this
hypothesis, Martin relates many colorful stories and gives a rich
overview of the field of paleontology as well as his own
fascinating career. He explores the ramifications of the overkill
hypothesis for similar extinctions worldwide and examines other
explanations for the extinctions, including climate change.
Martin's visionary thinking about our missing megafauna offers
inspiration and a challenge for today's conservation efforts as he
speculates on what we might do to remedy this situation--both in
our thinking about what is "natural" and in the natural world
itself.
Over the past thirty years, late Quaternary environments in the
arid interior of western North America have been revealed by a
unique source of fossils: well-preserved fragments of plants and
animals accumulated locally by packrats and quite often encased,
amberlike, in large masses of crystallized urine. These packrat
middens are ubiquitous in caves and rock crevices throughout the
arid West, where they can lie preserved for tens of thousands of
years. More than a thousand of these deposits have been dated and
analyzed, and middens have supplanted pollen records as a
touchstone for studying vegetation dynamics and climatic change in
radiocarbon time (the last 40,000 years). Now, similar deposits
made by other mammals like hyraxes are being reported from other
parts of the world. This book brings together the most recent
findings and views of many of the researchers now investigating
fossil middens in the United States, Mexico, Africa, the Middle
East, and Australia. The contributions serve to open a forum for
methodological concerns, update the fossil record of various
geographic regions, introduce new applications, and display the
vast potential for fossil midden analysis in arid regions
worldwide. The findings presented here will serve to foster
regional research and to promote general studies devoted to global
climate change. Included in the text are more than two hundred
charts, photographs, and maps.
"What caused the extinction of so many animals at or near the end
of the Pleistocene? Was it overkill by human hunters, the result of
a major climatic change or was it just a part of some massive
evolutionary turnover? Questions such as these have plagued
scientists for over one hundred years and are still being heatedly
debated today. "Quaternary Extinctions" presents the latest and
most comprehensive examination of these questions." --Geological
Magazine
"May be regarded as a kind of standard encyclopedia for
Pleistocene vertebrate paleontology for years to come." --American
Scientist
"Should be read by paleobiologists, biologists, wildlife managers,
ecologists, archeologists, and anyone concerned about the ongoing
extinction of plants and animals." --Science
"Uncommonly readable and varied for watchers of paleontology and
the rise of humankind." --Scientific American
"Represents a quantum leap in our knowledge of Pleistocene and
Holocene palaeobiology. . . . Many volumes on our bookshelves are
destined to gather dust rather than attention. But not this one."
--Nature
"Two strong impressions prevail when first looking into this epic
compendium. One is the judicious balance of views that range over
the whole continuum between monocausal, cultural, or environmental
explanations. The second is that both the data base and theoretical
sophistication of the protagonists in the debate have improved by a
quantum leap since 1967." --American Anthropologist
|
You may like...
Celebrations
Jan Kohler
Hardcover
R450
R351
Discovery Miles 3 510
|